Sexuality Professionals Series: An Interview with Caitlin V.

Embrace Sexual Wellness is conducting a multipart spotlight series of interviews with sexuality professionals. If you missed the first one with Dr. Shemeka Thorpe, you can find that article here. For the second installment in our interviews, we spoke with Caitlin V. (she/they) of BPP Coaching. 

According to the biography on her website, Caitlin studied sexuality and public health at Indiana University and The Center for Sexual Health Advancement. There, they discovered scientific revelations about human sexuality and performed ground-breaking research, but realized she really wanted to be helping people with their sex lives on a personal level. Now she does just that as a sex and relationship coach. They educate millions through her YouTube channel, her online courses, and their upcoming TV show.

Sex coaching is built on the idea that sex is a learnable skill. While generally people instinctively know the basic mechanics of sex because of evolution and biology, that doesn’t necessarily mean people intuitively know how to have good sex. Especially for people who grew up in environments lacking models for healthy romantic and sexual relationships, it’s not uncommon to need external guidance for how to have healthy, enjoyable, and safer sex. Generally speaking, the two kinds of sex coaches are talk coaches and experiential coaches. Talk coaches offer a talk therapy based approach supplemented with external resources like books and videos. Experiential coaches, on the other hand, teach a client through talking as well as hands-on practices. This might include breath, touch, and how to emit sexual energy. Sex coaching can help with a variety of needs such as sexual performance anxiety, communication, and boundaries.

What inspired you to pursue your career path? 
Knowing that sex education was disease-focused, I wanted to add a pleasure-centered perspective to those experiencing shame around sex.

How does your field differ from that of other sexuality professionals?
I am not licensed, which means I can play with ALL the colors of the rainbow and use unorthodox tools and techniques (and I don't have to deal with insurance!).

What is the most rewarding part of your career?
Seeing transformation in people's lives.

What's the most misunderstood thing about what you do?
I don't have any physical contact with anyone, and until recently, I didn't watch footage of them having sex.

What's the most common question you receive from others about your career?
“What kind of training did it require for you to get here?” The answer is a very non-linear and impossible to duplicate path. I encourage them to find their own.

What advice would you want to share with aspiring sexuality professionals?
Do your inner work right alongside your clients. Know that you don't have to know everything, just more than your clients.

If you had to describe your work in one sentence, what would you say?
 Helping people to have the best sex of their lives.

Thank you to Caitlin for taking the time to share their perspective. We encourage you to find Caitlin on social media and her websites, linked below.

• Instagram: @caitlinvictoriousx

• Youtube: Caitlin V.

• Website: caitlinvneal.com

Sexuality Professionals Series: An Interview with Dr. Shemeka Thorpe

So, you want to learn more about the world of sexuality professionals. There is a vast variety of different routes within the world of sexuality-based careers. To get an idea of what the sexuality industry is really like, Embrace Sexual Wellness interviewed several sexuality professionals from different backgrounds. We will be sharing their wisdom and insight with you in a series of blog posts spotlighting each professional. Our first participant is Dr. Shemeka Thorpe (she/her), co-founder of The Minority Sex Report and Sex Researcher at the University of Kentucky.

Shemeka Thorpe, PhD is a sexuality researcher at the University of Kentucky. Her research focuses on the sexual well-being of Black women using sex-positive and intimate justice frameworks. She serves on the editorial board of the American Journal of Sexuality Education. Dr. Thorpe is the co-founder of the award-winning platform The Minority Sex Report, a platform created to provide representation in sexuality education primarily for Black and Native American women.

Sexuality research as a field originated with Dr. Alfred Kinsey at the Indiana University at Bloomington. In 1948, Kinsey published his groundbreaking — and controversial — "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male," which became a bestseller. "Sexual Behavior in the Human Female" was the even more controversial followup in 1953. Prior to this, the vast majority of formal research about human sexuality was scarce. The research that did exist was anecdotally based on patient-therapist interactions. Sex is such a quintessential and core aspect of human life and social interactions that it is necessary to explore its trends, changes, and variations from person to person. On a tangible level, sexuality research about reproductive health and adjacent topics informs the development of healthcare strategies, therapies, and other treatments.  

Sexuality researchers span a wide array of topics under the umbrella of human sexuality. For Dr. Thorpe, her main focus is the sexual wellbeing of Black women. To contextualize that further, a recent article she co-authored was entitled “Black Female Adolescents' Sexuality: Pleasure Expectancies, Sexual Guilt, & Age of Sexual Debut.” It “examined individual and familial influences on Black female adolescents’ sexual pleasure expectancies, sexual guilt, and age of sexual debut…” This type of research makes up the majority of her invaluable work on an underserved demographic. 

In addition to her research, she co-founded The Minority Sex Report. This business both educates and conducts consultations in order to facilitate better representation in sex education for people of color within an intersectional framework. 

What inspired you to pursue your career path? 
Most of the research on Black people focuses on prevention and operates from a deficit based model. I want to change the narrative of Black sexology by focusing on sexual well-being particularly of Black women. Who better to do that than myself, a Black woman?

How does your field differ from that of other sexuality professionals?
There are a lot of sex researchers and we are all in different fields like public health, counseling, social work, sociology, women and gender studies, and the like. We all come together to advance sex research, but examine our research questions through different lenses. 

What's the most misunderstood thing about what you do?
That I solely focus on pregnancy and STI prevention as a sexuality educator or HIV and STI prevention as a sex researcher. I believe in comprehensive sex positive sex education and my research is sex positive focusing on Black women's overall sexual well-being, not prevention. 

What is the most rewarding part of your career?
The most rewarding part is creating a space for Black women to discuss sexuality and sexual problems including sexual anxiety and sexual pain. Many women have expressed they wish they had this information when they were younger or that this is there first time talking about these tough topics because they don't have a safe space to talk about sex. 

What advice would you want to share with aspiring sexuality professionals?
There is always room for more sexuality professionals. Be yourself and find your niche.

If you had to describe your work in one sentence, what would you say?
Making research relevant.

Thank you to Dr. Thorpe for taking the time to share her perspective. We encourage you to find Dr. Thorpe on social media and her websites, linked below.

• Instagram: @drshemeka

• Facebook: Dr. Shemeka

• Website: drshemeka.com & theminoritysexreport.com 

Questioning Your Gender, Now What?

So, you read our last blog post about gender and sexuality and after some self-reflection, you’ve got questions. Or maybe you’ve had questions for a while and are feeling a bit lost. Either way, lucky for you, you’ve got questions and we’ve got answers! Gender is an extremely complex concept; because it’s so deeply ingrained in every aspect of Western society, it can be difficult to divest yourself from oppressive notions of gender that were forced on you. Questioning your gender and your place in a world structured around gender binaries is a scary prospect and it’s okay to feel uncertain or uncomfortable. 

At the end of the day, this journey is for you and you only, with the ultimate goal being you feeling comfortable in your own skin. You deserve happiness and gender euphoria. There is nothing wrong or broken about you. There is no right way to be a particular gender therefore you can never be wrong. 

If you’re struggling to get started, here are some points to consider:

• If you’re considering changing facets of your identity like your name or pronouns, a good way to see if they fit is by “piloting” them with a group of trusted friends or family. This way, you don’t need to commit to a public announcement before you’re sure of yourself. 

• It’s never too late to question and explore! 

• You don’t need to have dysphoria or a desire to transition in order to be transgender or non-binary.

• There’s no deadline for figuring yourself out. Give yourself the grace of time to figure things out. 

• You may never arrive at a final destination; navigating and understanding gender identity is a complex and lifelong process. 

• Don’t get caught up in a need for labels and codification. Though labels can certainly be comforting, they may also be limiting. 

• You will almost inevitably experience confusion at some point and that’s not your fault; when you pick apart the way gender structures society, you will begin to see that there are a lot of holes in the logic underlying it which makes rearing up against those expectations so confusing and difficult. 

• If it’s accessible to you, don’t go it alone. Whether that means seeing a gender therapist, finding support groups either online or in person, or just talking it out with a trusted individual, you deserve external support throughout this process. 

• Institutions that you may have been taught were created to help you like medicine and education have ingrained systemic transphobia. While there are certainly individuals within these institutions that may be genuinely accepting and helpful, this is likely not the case for the majority of people you interact within these contexts, particularly depending on your specific geography. 

• If you find yourself self-invalidating your gender questioning process because you don’t feel genderqueer/trans “enough” but you wish you were (insert gender identity), that is indicative of that identity fitting you. Wanting to be a certain gender is a “symptom,” for lack of a better word, of being that gender. 

• Additionally, questioning is a valid identity. You might not want to be a certain gender and that is also telling and legitimate. The beauty of questioning the gender binary is that there are no wrong answers, nor does there have to be an answer in the first place. Questioning as an identity is every bit as valid as any other label.  

At the end of the day, try to find the balance between honoring your gender identity and not becoming overcome by the intricacies of navigating gender. Gender is performance in its most basic form and there are ways to make that performance fun. We didn’t choose the gender binary that exists around us, but we can choose to make it work for each of us to the best of our ability by understanding what makes us feel liberated. 

Inspired by Adrian Ballou’s article, it is important to qualify that this article is being written from the perspective of a singular white genderqueer person which may influence the suggestions provided.